My daughter’s favourite philosophy problem…

Time after time, since I first discovered him writing a column in Section P (Arts and Leisure) of the New York Times, Frank Rich has surprised and delighted me but today he surprised and disappointed me.

As always, he has woven a glorious narrative knitting far flung ideas around a familiar but unlikely concept. Today’s concept is the idea that America likes to create mythic figures out of malevolent schemers and the dishonest schemes that they create. The malevolent schemer who prompted today’s rambling magnificence is Tiger Woods.

I have so far managed to avoid finding out what Tiger did because, as far as I know, it is a private thing and none of my business [if I made mistake and it really is something that concerns me, please let me know and I'll go investigate and revise this rant - ed] so I don’t quite see what Tigers travails has to do with the rest of Rich’s otherwise excellent tour of the schemes and schemers who have so blighted the decade.

Back when Rich was still the NY Times’s drama critic, he managed to cover a lot of ground that the main editorial section was afraid to touch. He called bullshit on the weapons of mass destruction story that was running on the front page and that got the NYT in so much trouble (and the author in prison); he was against the Iraq war when the paper’s official position was that maybe we should slow down and think about this a little more.

If the pen is mighter than the sword, imagine how mighty you’d be writing with a sword dipped in ink. Well, Rich uses a machete and wields it in the direction of the greatest villains of our time. There were days in 2003 when it seemed like only Jon Stewart and Frank Rich were unafraid to say out loud what everyone else whispered in secret and the craven cowards of the NY Times editorial board merely suggested that they were somewhat unhappy with the situation in Iraq.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be the editor of the Art Section when Rich’s latest column dropped in your inbox. Er… Frank, this stuff about Yellowcake Uranium is great but you know that Andrew Lloyd-Weber has anew show opening on Monday?

So. I really like Frank Rich. I think he is an American hero. But he is supposed to be going after the hard targets, not golfers who are having wife troubles.

Back in the days of my youth, Daley Thompson was a Great British Hero. He had displayed the same effortless transcendence as Tiger and, like Tiger, he excelled at his sport (the Decathlon). I remember him having a run in with the press for some stupid thing (that I don’t remember) and I remember thinking that he had a certain power in his hands. If Daley were to make the nasty, crawling British Press an offer…

You can have my public life but leave my private life alone…or…it’s all over and I quit. Your choice. Choose now.

He could have driven a spear into the heart of the beast from which it would never recover. I wish there were a way for Tiger to do the same.

Maybe he could call Daley and they could work on it together?

Stuart Jeffries, in the Guardian, teaches us some economics about the Joy Of Giving.

deadweight loss: losses to one person that are not offset by the gains to someone else. Waldfogel estimates the global deadweight loss of Christmas 2006 to be more than $25bn (about £15bn).

All too many of us are destroying value when we buy presents. “People’s own choices generate 18% more satisfaction – per dollar spent – than do gifts,” he says. It is an orgy of wealth destruction, and in recession that’s one of the last things we need.

We have always tried to teach our children how wasteful gift-giving is but, according to his helpful new book  Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays,

economics professor Joel Waldfogel argues that there are three justifiable economic reasons for giving people gifts. They are:

1. Redistribution You are Robin Hood in an inegalitarian world. This is why, in the name of maximising utility, it’s OK to nick cases of Puligny-Montrachet from your boss’s house and hand them out at soup kitchens (but only to those who you’re sure aren’t alcoholics).
2. Paternalism Your daughter needs a hat. There’s no way she’ll ever buy one herself, so you get it. Then she loses it on the bus. So you have to buy her another, which she moans about for being itchy. Nobody said Christmas was going to be easy.
3. Altruism We try to make the recipient as satisfied as possible by getting them stuff they’d like. This only happens in your dreams or to my brother Neil who, now I think about it, is really good at buying presents, damn him.

We live less than 1/2 a mile and two tiny streets away from the 9 year old’s school and she asked if it would be OK for her to walk to school on her own. I asked The Google what is the current thinking on 9 year olds walking to school? and was shocked by what it told me.

I expected to find mixed opinions - a few people fondly remembering how they walked a couple of miles across a field when they were five; some others wondering whether it may be too dangerous in this day and age; a pragmatic smattering suggesting that it depend on the maturity of your child but…nope. The People on the Internet were unamimous.

IF YOU LET A NINE YEAR WALK TO SCHOOL SHE WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE MURDERED AND IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!!! PEOPLE LIKE YOU SHOULD BE LOCKED UP!!!

Here’s a civic dilemma for you.

Santa Clara wanted to set aside some open space for recreation and the general enjoyment of the people and put an initiative on the ballot to raise the funds. It passed.

But the California Supreme Court decided that the $20 a year per property tax payer constituted a tax rather than a fee. Taxes require a 2/3 majority. Fees only require a simple majority. It ruled the tax illegal.

What to do with the money that they have already raised for open spaces (about $130 total per household)?

A group who call themselves Taxpayers of Santa Clara sued and won a class action ruling that the county had to return the money - after deducting the $7m in lawyers fees (plus sundry other administration costs). I got my letter today.

If I fill in the form, I get my share of the bounty and the Open Spaces Authority fires a few park rangers and probably closes some parks.

In a taxpayer revolt - and a reversal of the usual situation - many taxpayers are refusing to claim their refund to

• Protest the frivolous lawsuit
• Show Taxpayers of Santa Clara that they do not represent us
• And to announce that we rather like open spaces and would like to fund them

Dear Santa Clara,

You can keep my $130.

Dear Taxpayers of Santa Clara,

You suck.

Dear Tony Tanke of Davis (who represented the Taxpayer of Santa Clara),

Enjoy your $7.4 million.

You suck too.

Ragged Clown

My mistake. It wasn’t a dilemma at all.

I read about america’s worst mom when she became famous last year. She has a book out.

The media dubbed me “America’s Worst Mom.” (Go ahead—Google it.) But that’s not what I am.

I really think I’m a parent who is afraid of some things (bears, cars) and less afraid of others (subways, strangers). But mostly I’m afraid that I, too, have been swept up in the impossible obsession of our era: total safety for our children every second of every day. The idea that we should provide it and actually could provide it. It’s as if we don’t believe in fate anymore, or good luck or bad luck. No, it’s all up to us.

Childhood really has changed since today’s parents were kids, and not just in the United States. Australian children get stared at when they ride the bus alone. Canadian kids stay inside playing video­games. After I started a blog called Free Range Kids, I heard from a dad in Ireland who lets his 11-year-old play in the local park, unsupervised, and now a mom down the street won’t let her son go to their house. She thinks the dad is reckless.

What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

If this is America’s worst mom, I had the worst mum in England. She made fun of me because I wouldn’t take a two mile bus ride to the doctor’s on my own when I was 10.

Lucky it wasn’t america because the police would’ve nabbed me.

I have to be honest, though: I write all this in a kind of shaky mood because I just got a call from the police. This morning, I put Izzy, now 10, on a half-hour train ride out to his friend’s house. It sounds like I’m a recidivist, but really: His friend’s family was waiting at the other end to pick him up, and he’s done this a dozen times already. It is a straight shot on a commuter railroad. This particular time, however, the conductor found it outrageous that a 10-year-old should be traveling alone, and summoned the police, who arrived as my son disembarked.

A couple of years ago an older couple accosted me in The Good Guys because I had left my kids watching the big screen TVs while I looked for a stereo. Who knows who might’ve snatched my urchins away in the 4 minutes that they were alone.

But…

Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.

Like the housewives of the 1950s, today’s children need to be liberated. Unlike the housewives of the ’50s, the children can’t do it themselves. Though I’d love to see hordes of kids gathering for meetings, staging protests, and burning their baby kneepads—and maybe they will—it is really up to us parents to start renormalizing childhood. That begins with us realizing how scared we’ve gotten, even of ridiculously remote dangers.

Locking children away is cruel.

Be free, little children! Be free!

This one might get me in trouble despite my best efforts to not offend.Sorry in advance.

If you read as many conservative blogs as I do, you may have seen the celebrations over the latest Gallup poll.

David Frum has a theory about that poll.

Charles Franklin of Pollster.com explains the poll’s big technical error. Gallup oversampled Republicans. At a time when only 1 in 5 Americans identifies as Republican, 32 percent of the respondents in Gallup’s survey group identified themselves as Republican.

[snip]

As the Republican Party shrinks, it becomes more conservative. Today’s shriveled GOP is much more pro-life than the robust GOP of years past. So if you oversample Republicans, you are oversampling pro-lifers. Sure enough, when you look at Gallup’s breakdown of its results, all the rise in anti-abortion feeling is concentrated among self-identified Republicans.

More interesting to me though is his analysis that

…Gallup’s poll is wrong in a far more important way. For all their vehement disagreement, pro-lifers and pro-choicers agree that the abortion debate is about rights: the woman’s right to choose, the unborn child’s right to life. Pro-choicers may sternly disapprove of the irresponsible woman who casually discards one pregnancy after another. Pro-lifers may feel tremendous sympathy for the woman considering abortion because she feels she cannot raise a child on her own. Both agree that the reason for the abortion is absolutely irrelevant.

The 55% of us who are neither absolutely pro-life or pro-choice (or both! Choose life!) frame it a little differently.

Frum talks through a couple of scenarios in the grey area

“Suppose a woman has two boyfriends at the same time, gets pregnant, and wants an abortion so she won’t have to admit to her two-timing. Is that okay?”

“Now suppose another woman is working her way through college. Her boyfriend dumps her when she tells him she’s pregnant. If she carries the baby, she’ll have to drop out and take any job she can find in this tough economy. She has decided abortion is her best choice—should the government stop her?”

but I am too much of a coward to go there so I’ll switch to an analogy.

The Straight Dope has a fascinating discussion about the ethics surrounding peeing in public places. Pretty much everyone agrees that peeing in public places is wrong…but sometimes it’s the least wrong option.

But it’s hard to encode that kind of moral calculus into law. The law wants things to be completely legal or completely illegal while morality is rarely so black and white.

And when the law does try address complex moral issues it ends up in tying itself up in knots - it’s illegal to pee in public unless you are with your mother, are under three and can’t make it to MacDonalds …or it’s after nightfall and there is a tree and no cars are passing by for at least 20 seconds.

How much better would the legal system be if there were a class of professionals trained in the law but given the discretion to judge whether something, though technically illegal, was merited because of extenuating circumstances (Jeff has suggested a name for this class of professionals - judgers).

My analogy breaks down though because we already have a class of professionals that is more than adequately equipped to make this kind of judgment in the case of abortion. They are called doctors. The law has nothing to add.

“The United States is a country that takes human rights seriously. We do not torture. It’s against our laws and against our values. And we expect all those who serve America to conduct themselves accordingly, and we enforce those rules…America is a fair and a decent country. President Bush has made it clear, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the laws and standards of this nation make no exceptions for wartime. As he put it, we are in a fight for our principles and our first responsibility is to live by them. The war on terror, after all, is more than a contest of arms and more than a test of will. It’s also a war of ideas.”

Hint: start with “ch” rhymes with blamey.

Try this:

“…[T]here is no place for abuse in what must be considered the family of man. There is no place for torture and arbitrary detention. There is no place for forced confessions. There is no place for intolerance of dissent…the roots of American rule of law go back more than 700 years, to the signing of the Magna Carta. The foundation of American values, therefore, is not a passing priority or a temporary trend.”

Or:

“[The perpetrators of torture] deserve jail or execution, and will probably get one or both…[Torture] should be dealt with very, very harshly. But those who would…make such behavior emblematic of our effort, instead of recognizing it as an abandonment of our principles — are mere opportunists.”

More (with answers) at Obsidian Wings.

I recently finished Michael Shermer’s Science of Good and Evil and reviewed it on Facebook.

I have been enjoying Michael Shermer’s blog and writings in Skeptic magazine for a while now. His interviews with creationists are particularly spectactular. This book? Not so much. The title of the book should’ve been “meanderings thoughts about ethics from a libertarian agnostic.”

The Libertarian side of Shermer came to the fore in a couple of blog postings over the last few days when someone asked him how he squared his libertarianism with his self-professed status as a skeptic.

In a nutshell, I am a libertarian because conservatives are a bunch of gun-totting, Hummer-driving, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white-thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally-hypocritical blowhards, and liberals are a bunch of tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, sandle-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, Namby Pamby bedwetters. There’s a better way. Libertarianism.

In one post he rattled off the Libertarian Manifesto and the comments were jammed with all the usual criticism of libertarian ideas but this one captured the problems just so.

“If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.”

This quote comes from an essay in American Conservative. The quality of the essay is mixed but it has a couple of real gems - freedom as a downpayment on future freedoms.

In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.

and

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.